Grove Shakespeare Play : Director Is True to Renaissance in ‘Two Gentlemen’

Some directors reach for the farcical in staging Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” turning this early work into a cartoonishly bawdy love quadrangle. A New York production, for instance, put the actors in clownish duds and beat-up tennis shoes to create almost a circus air.

But Victor Pappas won’t have any of that. Pappas, who is directing the comedy for the Grove Shakespeare Festival, sees it as “a very serious story with purposeful comments about the nature of love, relationships and friendship.”

Pappas, 38, has acting and directing credits on both coasts. His “Two Gentlemen” (opening in the Festival Amphitheatre in Garden Grove today) will be reflectively paced, he said: “The tempo will be slower, more deliberate, (designed) to have the audience get inside the characters. . . . I see this, in many ways, as the other side of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ and I wanted to approach it with a fairly straightforward intent.”

Attributing that depth to a play not generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s finest--written about 1590, it is considered relatively minor by many scholars--may be pushing it, but Pappas supports his stance by offering the subtleties of the relationship between Valentine and Proteus.

The noble Valentine and the reckless Proteus are close friends. While Valentine talks about leaving for Milan to see something of the world, Proteus talks of love and more love. He woos the chaste Julia as Valentine, sent to the palace of the Duke of Milan, falls for the Duke’s virginal daughter, Silvia.

But the fickle Proteus, after arriving at the palace himself, becomes enamored of Silvia. He then plots to have Valentine exiled, hoping to win Silvia. His machinations are more the result of youthful excess than Machiavellian maneuvering. After all this toil and trouble, the friends (and their ladies) remain fast friends at play’s end.

Pappas sees in the two main characters, especially Proteus, the results of vanity and selfishness that relate “with pointed relevance” to contemporary man, especially in the aftermath of the 1970s “me generation.”

“The play has a lot of things about our behavior,” he said, “when we get involved in deep relationships, in conflicts, when we love ourselves more than others, when we let vanity become an overriding force. Proteus is especially caught up in himself, mainly because he is so young and doesn’t know any better.

“Of course, this is a comedy, and there’s a lot of bawdiness and laughs in it, but it’s a mistake to see it only as that.”

Pappas considered placing “Two Gentlemen” in a ‘70s setting, complete with incipient yuppies, but decided to be true to the play’s historical nature. “It is very Renaissance in flavor, very courtly in appearance, and I wanted to keep that. Also, Proteus is very much a Renaissance man, and I didn’t want to dilute that any either.”

Further, Pappas admitted that he tends to be more traditional than some directors when approaching Shakespeare.

“Updating some of the plays can work, but most don’t,” said Pappas, who is considered staging “The Merchant of Venice” in pre-Nazi Germany.

“I always worry about them (updates) getting too gimmicky or subverting Shakespeare’s original intent.”

In maintaining the comedy’s pristine vision, Pappas and set designer Stanley Meyer have tried to create an Italian garden villa closely reflecting the idealized paintings of Maxfield Parrish.

“If we can evoke that romantic aura, get people to understand the characters and have them laugh a little too, then I’ll be happy.”

Like many theater people, Pappas goes back to his childhood when remembering the pivotal experience that set him on a stage path.

Growing up in Manhattan, his parents were regular theatergoers. He recalled being taken to the Broadway production of “Camelot” when he was 9.

“It really struck me . . . that I could do that, that I wanted to do that. It just seemed so magical. I really didn’t start doing theater seriously until college, but after that experience, it was always in the back of my mind.”

Pappas eventually studied acting and began making the tryout circuit, winning parts in off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions and appearing in “Happy End” with Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in 1977. He said he had reasonable success but decided to come out to the West Coast in the late ‘70s to teach and find more acting opportunities.

He performed in the prestigious Ashland Shakespeare Festival in Oregon and in various productions locally and in the Bay Area. But in 1982 he realized that he would rather direct than act--his first project was “The Pajama Game” for a Santa Maria theater.

Since then, he has directed several plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “Hedda Gabler” and Jamie Baker’s “South Central Rain,” for which he won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award in 1988.

“The Pajama Game,” Pappas said, “required 20 scenes changes, so it was a challenge for me. When I found I could do it, directing became what I wanted to do. I’m just one of those people who is more interested in a play as a whole; even as an actor, I was always interested in more than my own part. What else could I become, but a director?”

The Grove Shakespeare Festival’s production of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona” plays Thursday through Sunday at 8:30 p.m. through Sept. 16 at the Festival Amphitheatre, 12852 Main St., Garden Grove. Tickets: $16 to $23. (714) 636-7213.